Saturday, December 02, 2017

Jerks fornicate (but don't necessarily procreate)

In response to GSS data showing that criminals get more tail than those who follow the law do, Jig Bohnson wonders if it is merely a consequence of people at the bottom of society in general both rutting more and ending up in the slammer more:

There is no controlling for income or socioeconomic status here. Are we just seeing the effect of lower socioeconomic classes being more promiscuous? The prison population, white or otherwise, is drawn overwhelmingly from the lower strata of society.

The question was only asked in 2012, so the sample size is in the hundreds instead of the thousands or tens of thousands. Consequently there's a limit to how much drilling down can be done.

Generally speaking, there is virtually no difference in lifetime sexual partners by social class. From 2000 onward lower, working, middle, and upper class men all report a median number of lifetime sexual partners of five.

It's not clear, then, that lower classes are more promiscuous, especially given that they are less likely than middle and upper classes to be married and so correspondingly less likely to be putatively committed to fidelity to a single partner.

Looking at partner counts among men of the same social class provides further evidence that the answer to Jig's reasonable question is probably "no". The following graph shows the median number of lifetime female sexual partners among men who have and have not spent time behind bars, by social class. The sample sizes for lower and upper class respondents are small, but the trend is present across the social spectrum:

This does not, of course, speak to the quality of the women, only to the quantity.

Before the progressive enlightenment brought us women's liberation and the castration of the patriarchy, society had ways of keeping criminals and low-lifes away from nubile women at risk of spreading their legs for said criminals and low-lifes. With those ways having been crippled, criminals and low-lifes are free to prowl.

Interestingly, the deleterious effects of the sexual revolution may be neutralized by the salubrious effects--at least in this particular context--of modern contraception. While criminals and low-lifes do more fornicating, they do not appear to do more procreating. Among men aged 30 or older, those who have done time average 1.94 children while those who have not average 2.08 children.

17 comments:

Like Comrade Stalin said,"Quantity has a quality all its own." That quality is cheap plastic crap. Oh sure, you can say he won. If by won, you mean he was poisoned by his doctor.Hugh Hefner was a "Love God". Kind of like the movie with Don Knotts. He got whores by the planeload. And one ADOPTED daughter. Gee that's a lot of dry holes there.You see these celebs bragging about all that poon tang. The numbers seem impressive. If only they or their fans had Math Skills.Whores are easy. On the easy level, every video game can be won. If by won you mean not at all challenging.Some people seek challenge. These guys are called Champions, Heroes and are the stuff of Myth and Legend. Other guys get a lot of stuff. They are called profligates, fools, materialists or The Prodigal Son.Trump is a profligate. He puts his name on lots of stuff. I imagine it will impress the rubes. It might take awhile for the heirs to sell it off, and it becomes some other name. Like Corporate Logo.You can be Don Juan. You might WANT to be Don Juan. Probably because you NEVER READ Don Juan. Don Juan is a Tragedy. The punch line or moral is at the end. When he gets to Hell, and a woman WHO REALLY LOVES HIM tells him she wanted to marry him and bear his children. He goes to Hell willingly, after realizing his whoring added up to naught. All that poon tang and no one to remember him or CARRY HIS NAME.

I would not necessarily say criminals but men at the edge and cads do. They simply impregnate several women and that women then find a man to take care of their offspring. This goes through all classes. And gypies, they are a distinct category... But I am writing this from Eastern European perspective, I can see commonalities but many things cannot be applied to the US.

I must say, that median lifetime partner count is quite surprising to me, both that it doesn't vary across social class, and that it is 4 and not, say, 15. The result that criminals get more sexual access completely agrees with my anecdotal observations; while the result on generic partner counts being low and not variable is completely at odds with my observations.

I think you should take a closer look at who sends letters to these cell block lotharios. Its hardly the kind of groupies you see at rock concerts throwing their panties on the stage. These guys are a real captive audience and their ex probably doesn't want them if they are in the can for more than five years. These lonely boys are just easy pickings for wimmens who have hit the wall and are more Invisible than Mister Fantastic's wife. You can bet these guys are not getting quality out of these "love letters" from lonely women. These are desperate fatties and past their expiration date old girls. However, the dating pool of guys sitting behind bars is either desperate oldies and fatties or some dude in the shower.

It could also just be linked to extroversion and lack of concern for others opinions, thus making them much more likely to make passes at women which is likely the single most limiting factor of any mans tally of total sexual partners.

It's interesting to see the number of partners for non-prison men not change by class but it does for prison men. Presumably because in poorer areas the local men don't have as much to offer in terms of resources so being a thug is relatively more alluring and declines as one goes up the class ladder and social appearances count for more.

I am still surprised that the number of partners does not vary by class for the normal population.

As for the number of partners for the prison population varying by social class, another cause could be that people in different classes tend to serve time for different crimes. For the lower classes it is mostly the thug stuff. For the upper classes, it may be tilted more toward white collar crime or crimes of momentary passion that do not indicate a thuggish personality generally. Just speculation though.

AE: "My sense is that people tend to overestimate the amount of sex other people are having as a general rule."

Gee, that couldn't have anything to do with (((Hollywood))) could it? Our society is so misinformed (as a whole) on pretty much everything as a result of the (((propaganda machine))) that's been spinning a new reality for decades. Combined with the Fake News and it really is all encompassing.

It's just stunning when you really think about it. And I know I was subject to it, of course. And I still have to consciously struggle against it when thinking about some aspect of society. It's powerful stuff, for sure.

Duke Norfolk, ditto. I have to often catch myself and realize that I still live in a cesspool of lies, misinformation and utter stupidity. It's kind of distressing, though...to realize that what I don't know from personal experience is not only unknown, but perhaps unknowable (given the pervasive unreliability of sources.)

Almost everything we "know" about sex (well, others' sex) is baloney. People come in three flavors WRT this subject: Those who lie to the upside, those who lie to the downside and those who believe the subject far too private to respond at all. To me, this renders all collations of such answers utterly meaningless, simply illustrations of the sample bias problems that saturate sex questionnaires (and if such questionnaires exhibit some degree of parallel, that only informs us that the biases are pervasive.)

I've adopted a new framework. It holds that deductive logic and common sense should rule, and when some social science statistic claims to contradict logic and common sense, the automatic response is to call Bullshit. I figure 99% of the time I'll be right.

WRT sex, deductive logic and common sense inform me of several things:1. Couples in happy marriages have the most sex.2. Couples in happy marriages have the best sex.3. Oral contraceptives paradoxically damage a woman's interest in sex.4. Depth of emotional intimacy determines the quality/frequency of sex.5. As n of sex partners rises, ability to form deep, emotionally intimate relationships declines.6. Therefore, those who push the "screw your way through the phonebook" approach are evil, demonic, vicious cockroach/human hybrids who should be ignored long enough for their genes to be extinguished from the human genome.

There are some people who are doomed to travel life on Unhappiness Path.

Wrt to differences in crimes by class, that fits the jerk/badboy premium theory pretty well.

Anon,

Yes. We work with what we have, though.

Duke Norfolk,

Indeed. It's of course not novel in the least to criticize the degeneracy that is Western popular entertainment. It's been standard for generations now. It's so baked in that it's easy to forget that it does not align with reality.

dc.sunsets,

That list of 1-6 is especially true for women. Feminism, of course, makes women miserable by advocating they ignore the list even though they need to adhere to it even more than men do.

Audacious, while the heterogeneity of men (and women) may mean that some people do not suffer ill effects of high n counts, I suspect most are worse off for it.

Argument by anecdote sucks, but I synthesize a couple anecdotes and reach a conclusion:1. I knew a girl in college who explicitly stated that her goal (when screwing some guy) was to "put her face on his every subsequent orgasm." IOW, she wanted to taint his every subsequent relationship by placing an experience associated with fantasy in his head.2. I knew a guy who told me that his wife was not the woman about whom he was most passionate; that title went to a girl who (from his description) took the entire script from a typical porn movie and acted it out with him. I have no doubt whatsoever that this was a contributing factor to his divorce. I also think she was doing exactly what the girl I knew in college did.

Synthesis: Some percentage of easy lays will be girls who try to make the experience so memorable that the tape will replay in the man's head forever. They do this not because they were "into the man" that much, but just to (frankly) fuck him over, and "win" the contest between them and every woman he beds downstream. It is a permanent and ongoing way for a woman to exhibit social status warfare with other women.

Everything we do becomes a part of us. Every experience leaves a memory. Filling our heads with memories about such intimate things is a freaking disaster. Imagine the man with a high n, who cannot escape comparing his wife's "technique" to Alice's oral, Betty's hand, Caroline's dirty talk, Dorothy's doggy, etc., etc., etc. That's not a prescription for marital bliss. It's even worse for the high n woman, but to me, anyone who embeds physical intimacy memories without any expectation of emotional intimacy or (ideally) permanence is just begging to lose the map to finding Happiness Path.

When young, the life ahead is like a corridor with many doors. From 13 or so onward, actions taken in the present begin to close some of those doors. I submit that embarking on a hedonistic path, embracing casual intimacy and revolving door sex partners means that when later the individual arrives at the door marked, "deep, emotionally-intimate and lifelong partnership" it will be closed, locked, and welded shut. On it will hang a sign directing him or her a few doors down, to the one marked "Liebowitz, Liebowitz and Murray, Attorneys at Law, specializing in divorce and child custody." That door will be wide open.

Could be right about the kids but I will note there are two groups of men I have close knowledge of that have lots of children. Men with loose morals either criminals or just plain horn dogs and Mormons. My Mormon friends and family all have a metric ton of kids.

I have a friend who is a cousin of Mitt Romney. In his socio-economic class and profession you'd expect two kids a dog etc. They've got six or seven kids. Too bad we don't have more Mormons.

Don't disagree. Men are more easily able to compartmentalize sex than women, though. It's a base need. It can be more than that, but it doesn't have to be. It's why men watch porn videos and women don't.

“Among men aged 30 or older, those who have done time average 1.94 children while those who have not average 2.08 children.”

This is not accurate measurement of fertility, because it checks men who could still have kids in the future (30 year olds). So it is unclear if prisoners have more children or not because this is the wrong age cohort, some of those men could still have children in the future, so the numbers and ratio could change.

When you check women’s fertility for example, you check the average number of children for 45 year + women, not for 30 year old women, as that will be inaccurate and too low number. In the same way, you should check at least men aged 60 + for their total fertility number.

So these numbers are not accurate and its quite possible that prisoners could have more children in the end.